Hi

I've decided to completely rewrite this post! I find that when I write in the middle of the night it just doesn't make sense, sorry to those who took the time to read the original...

Essentially, I have some questions because I tend to flip flop on my impressions of DD7. Things get really murky with her perfectionism and our homeschooling dynamic. I'm hoping that those with more knowledge/experience can shed some light. My first question is, does giftedness 'level off'? In other words, once a child finds a level of appropriate challenge do things slow down a bit? My second question is have you ever overestimated or under underestimated your child's ability? This is where my flip flopping comes into play. My DD really likes things to be super easy and is very resistant to challenging herself. I generally believe that she is capable of more demanding work, but because she gets so upset if she makes ANY mistakes, she prefers to work on things that she doesn't need to put much thought into. I don't push her because it always ends in disaster and so she just 'coasts' along. And then comes my flop... maybe this work is challenging enough and I am overestimating her abilities... and then back to the flip... my gut reaction is that she is capable of more. So, my next question is, do I trust my mommy instinct? DD has not been assessed and so I don't have any numbers. I would love to hear your thoughts on this all.

Annaliisa

And... sorry that this is posted in under 'elementary', I should been in another section. I wasn't able to change it.

Children go through periodic phases of 'great leaps/steady and impressive improvement/improvement at rates which would be considered normal in a group of agemates but feel glacial to us.
This happens to all of us all the time. The advantage of homeschooling is that there is no awkward social component ((grin)) But even that is ok....

This is exactly classic 'perfectionism' that is caused by long periods of working below the challenge level. How long did you dd have to be in a poor fit environment? Was the poor fit at home, or during her school history?
There will be emotional outbursts - it's normal. Work on having some routines down to deal with 'stress overloads.' If you plan and practice, it won't be so bad. For example, I lived in an apartment where we'll lose electricity about once a week. Once I organized the flashlights and put fresh batteries in them, losing electricity wasn't so bad.

You can also work on DD growing her inner strength to deal with strong emotions. Meditation, Praising micro-victories, Planning micro-challenges all help.

I think your mommy instincts are enough, but I also think that having the support of a wise and useful tester is a nice luxury to have.

Afterall - you are saving the family the cost of private school tuition, so don't you deserve a little 'continuing education?'

The other thing that a really good assessment will show is if there are any hidden 2E issues that might be causing your daughter to 'go protective' in order to 'cover up' a real issue.

Since testing usually has a waiting list, you might want to make a reservation, and devote yourself to journaling what you see during the school day and make your decision when the test date draws nearer.

Perhaps a more concrete way to get some useful data is to forget IQ (who cares, really?) and get a MAP test which shows you - exactly - where she is in various school achievements. Perhaps it's more important to figure out where she truly is - right now - than to have info about 'her potential.'

Love and More love,
Grinity

(hint for future posts)
Be Generous with the carriage return. Create space in your posts by putting paragraph formatting between thoughts, and before and after questions. Lots of folks don't read in a straight line, but let their eye sweep over the post to get an overview first. Good Luck!


And... sorry that this is posted in under 'elementary', I should been in another section. I wasn't able to change it. [/quote]

I could have totally written this post. I am homeschooling a 4th grader and a 1st grader. My kids are super laid back. They get excited about their own passions, but don't devour college level textbooks. Unless perhaps it's about the obsession du jour.

One thing that has helped with denial on my oldest is having achievement testing done twice. He's also taken the SCAT. His scores have been very high. He's also doing algebra as a 4th grader, despite me kind of dragging my heels. I was dragging my heels because I really felt his patience, interest, and writing skills weren't ready for real, rigorous algebra even though conceptually he had been there for a while.

I try to balance with my kids. My 1st grader is challenged very little academically at the moment - I'm trying to compact some things for her so she can be more challenged by fall perhaps. But she's a young first grade and she is being challenged daily by extracurricular things like violin lessons. My 4th grader does 30-45 minutes a day of math and if that means it takes a week to get through a section in his Algebra curriculum, so be it. My kids do get frustrated very easily. But they also are so happy with themselves when they figure out something new. I think overcoming that perfectionism/laziness is a marathon not a sprint, and I've seen quite a bit of progress with my 4th grader in this area now that we're into our 3rd year of homeschooling. You can start with challenging her academically just a few minutes at a time and go from there. I wouldn't panic - 7 is still very young! And if you can afford some open ended achievement testing that can be very helpful as a baseline. We had the Peabody K-12 oral achievement done in our house for $55.

Thanks for your feedback. As always, it has been so helpful...

Grinity, it does feel 'glacial' that is a great way of putting it. I am accustomed to huge leaps and so it is harder to see the slow but steady progress.

As for the bad educational fit, it was at school (preschool and K)and at home. The school part was way too easy and I think this contributed to the perfectionism, too much praise, zero challenge, etc. The home part is more complicated. DD perceives any kind of instruction as criticism. I also routinely misinterpret DDs emotional response to life, especially HS.

I think that we clash because I love a challenge and absolutely loath doing 'easy' things. It's actually a problem TBH. As soon as I figure something out I lose all interest. I sometimes wonder if HS was smooth and easy if it would push me over the edge DD appears to be opposite at this point. She loves 'easy' and runs crying and screaming from a challenge. The screaming part is hard...

As for the assessment I really think that we need to do it all. I don't want to miss anything. I also flip back and forth on the possibility of 2E. I keep putting it off because of the cost.


You are absolutely right. I don't think that I've ever heard someone describe the perfectionism/laziness combo. I see this with DD everyday. I think that my understanding of perfectionism is very superficial, even though I struggle with perfectionism. I feel like I'm peeling an onion for the most part.

I'm also starting to understand how low my DDs self esteem really is. She generally responds to frustration with anger. For YEARS I've interpreted this as being strong willed, but it's not. My poor little onion. She is only 7, as you said.

A.

Great notice A that 'strong willed' isn't deep enough. Good luck with the Marathon.

Wow, that's my dd10 to a "T." She is so hard for me to teach anything b/c she gets so angry and defensive and constantly interrupts me. It is a real test of my patience! I am still working on letting her talk and explain what she's doing even if it makes no sense to me. I'm also still working on getting her to be polite and give me a minute to explain another way. It is an ongoing challenge, though.

If you are going to invest the $, just make sure that you test with someone with a lot of experience with 2e not just disabilities. We tested twice -- once with a psych grad student who was monitored by the head of the psych dept (he watched the testing and oversaw the scoring). Dd came out EG/PG (99.9) on the WISC that time, but they didn't see any indication of 2e even with her school achievement being below ability. At the time, she was on an upswing achievement wise so we figured it was underachievement and went with that. The professor had some experience with gifted, but I don't know about 2e.

We then re-tested a year later with a psych who had experience with LD but not so much so with giftedness. On the same IQ test, she was now MG. Again, the psych told us no LD and the earlier scores were likely wrong. Even with very high highs (99.9) and much lower lows pulling the total # down, we were told there was no problem and that she didn't recommend putting dd into GT programming b/c she didn't need it.

Two years down the road as things continued not to improve, we had her see a psych with no further testing who dx her with ADD and an anxiety disorder. This one is more familiar with 2e and gifted. She suggests that we retest dd yet again b/c she thinks that she might be PG and qualify for something like DYS. We're not sure that dd is that high and aren't retesting at this point, but maybe someday. We'll see.

If she has very high highs (99.9 percentile), you might try going ahead and submitting to DYS with the scores you already have.

Just a thought, I tend to sense that many sensitive and perfectionist children (mine included) can barely tolerate their own parents instructions or correction. They really take it to heart as if their very self-being was under attack.

Sometimes they take it just a bit better when a teacher or another adult makes the criticism/correction. So I often am the facilitator and child does his/her own learning, whenever possible.

Your posts sound like my child.

We plan for child to make mistakes. I suggest that this work is really way too hard but we're going to practice guessing. (I pretend to guess wrong and pretend to resist answering the question, I then verbally aloud encourage myself that it will be ok if I get it wrong, then I go ahead and get it wrong, then I show that I want to know what the right answer is, etc etc)

Then I ask child what guess they'd like to make etc, let's hold our hands together and see if we'll get it right. Oh look, we got it right!

This was a few years back now that we did that. Child is better now with it. There are still moments though.

We try to reduce those moments so that child can feel like they have more control and not feel less control over their emotions. When there are less of such situations, it won't seem so overwhelming for the child. Yes, I think we coddled. But our purpose was so that it was more manageable and teach child to learn to manage their own expectations.

Fear and the feeling of being unable to control's one's feelings or not understanding why one's self is like that makes a child have great difficultly moving into teenage years.

We spend a great deal of time talking about situations, what it may feel like, what it felt like during/after, etc. We help child with the words to explain the feelings. This way the child knows that we understand and accept those feelings as normal for our family, it is ok to feel it, and what we can do about it.

Gosh, I hope my rambling is a bit helpful.
Best wishes,

Wow, Jesse. I wish you had been my mom...

Thanks intparent I think back to when I was a kid and what I wished someone had taught me.

Back to the OP, I think I've underestimated my kid. Only now at age 7 have I really started to provide what I thought was more difficult material. Some material appears that I've gone crazy and have given too much. Some where I think is too much is something kid loves and isn't at all too much.

The minute you think you've got a handle on it -- the kid is "here" -- and then it all changes. And it does seem to vary approx. every 3 months.

Sorry, not very helpful here.
Best wishes,

We have similar problems with DD8.5 and myself. I have to give myself a pep talk before I help her with anything. I have to remind myself that she doesn't see things like I do. It takes every ounce of my patience and a bunch that I have out on loan to get through a single homework session. Even the 'easy' stuff is a struggle because she might actually have to *gasp* WRITE SOMETHING DOWN!.

I am so happy that I found this forum. It helps to read how others struggle with similar problems. I was beating myself up last night after a disasterous session with her 'extra' work project. She is trying to convince her teacher that she can do harder work, but in truth.... she would never do it. I had to sit and hold her hand and cheerlead her through each step. It made me want to just give up advocating for her. She fights work at every turn. I guess I need to start thing of her as an onion, too. Although, I detest onions and they make me gag, LOL.

Ah, lots of memories here.

The main thing I'd say is that I would not just decide this is hard to deal with and the best plan is to avoid it. That's a great way to really feed the problem and to end up with a kid who is very difficult to deal with. This will cut down on your child's opportunities.

Thing to try: Get the child on your team where together you are working on deciding if work is appropriate. It won't take long before your child catches on that the elusive "just right" challenge can be very hard to find. The rule of thumb I read online that worked well for us: if you get 95% or more right we failed. You aren't going to learn anything from that and I don't want to waste your time. Same goes if you are going to get more than x percentage wrong. I will try to avoid assignments that but because you are an atypical learner (years ahead in some things, just your age in some things) there is a lot of guesswork and I won't always guess right. If I give you something that is way off that please tell me and we'll work together to find an alternative.

So, what you are trying to do is shift your child into the role where they are taking more responsibility. That may make them more sympathetic to the difficulty of finding appropriate assignments. And, it says the place of error is in finding the assignments, not in them. It will ultimately help you get better at figuring out that "just right" zone because they will be encouraged to communicate with you calmly rather than just melting down once they get started. This focus helps kid the kid in the thinking zone rather than deep in the feeling zone.

We combined this with lots of learning techniques to be able to stay on track when confronted with difficult material. Those including: setting a timer for x minutes (the child's choice) to see if they can make it through that time without a meltdown, learning to take stretching, exercise or breathing breaks, learning to set small realistic goals and noticing success when they are achieved, and working with outside classes and instructors where the child will be motivated to stick with it.

We had this also. I clearly remember the morning when I was driving DS - then 11 - to his day camp, a wonderful engineering-orriented camp with tons of peers, and he admitted - for the first time in his life - that one of his factoids that he gave me yesterday, was infact wrong.

I almost drove the car off the road - I was so suprised!!!!

Up until then he not only 'did battle' with me, he used to do it in school if the teacher tried to correct his writing samples. Our little town certianly didn't know what to do with a 3rd grader who, when told that he didn't do his writting correctly, handled it by telling the teacher - right to her face - that she was the one who was wrong. They had never seen a kid like mine, but let me know that it was all my fault for bad parenting. Perhaps it was, but jeesh!

((No wonder it was hard to see the difference between strong willed and totally insecure.))

What helps (slowly) was working together with Aleks.com, so that it wasn't ME saying he was wrong, and the reinforcer was really prized (new more difficult problems and beating the level.)

Also, I learned to say: "Oh, that's an interesting perspective" instead of "You are so wrong!"
Or "hum, that's not how I remember it, lets look that up, ok?"

It certianly was also true that lots of outlandish sounding factoids that sounded implausable to me that came from DS's mouth, were in fact true. That made the whole thing more tricky.

I'd console myself by thinking of all the dear men in my life who I've never yet heard 'Oh, I was wrong about that' from. Eleven might be late for that sort of admission, but it could be worse!

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Great ideas Passy,
My mom was terrific with 'well, just start, and in 10 minutes we'll see how it's going' with me, and I was so impressed with how often that was all it took.

When DS was in 4th grade, he usually tackled his homework worksheet right away and without much prodding. I called it the 'close your eyes and think of England' approach. But one day he came home in tears that he had 2 worksheets and it was so HARD and he had too much work and he would never be able to do it.....

I set up the timer and said: "Ok, do 10 minutes and we'll see" and then he finished in less than 90 seconds. I know because the time was running. That's is part of what prompted me to change his school for the following year. It really looked to me that the less he streched himself then the less he would be able to strech himself in the future. I had had such a hard time making the jump from 'open my ears and let the learning float in or give up' in High School, to actually working at learning in College that I didn't want the same thing to happen to my DS. Especially since I couldn't have gotten through that transition without plenty of peer support, which I got by playing the damsel in distress. I was pretty sure that that particular road wasn't going to be availible to my proud DS.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Everyday I think to myself, I really need to follow up on this thread but I don't. I still feel overwhelmed. I am so thankful for all of the suggestions and responses. I haven't been following this forum lately because I've been reading, reading, reading... one minute things seem like they are getting better and then it's back to square one. Right now I'm reading the Nurtured Heart Approach and various books on perfectionism, underachievement, anxiety!!!! I'm hoping to have some coherent thoughts soon!!! In the meantime, a very belated thanks.

Annaliisa

Hi Annaliisa,
Good to see you! Glad to hear that there are glimpses of moments where things seem to bee improving - it's only been 6 weeks! That's helps me hope that there is some movement - which is great when you think about how long your DD has been the way she used to be.

If you have any questions about Nurtured Heart, I'll do my best to answer them - that and getting the educational fit right is the only thing that worked for our family.

You mentioned that you like a challenge - here's one:
For the next week, see if you can find 5 moments in your day with DD where she is either doing something neutral or positive, and verbally narrate to her what you see without making any conclusions or judgements. Then post here daily what you saw and how she reacted to what you described.

(According to the book, they want you to do this once every 7 minutes in the begining, (since she's 7) and some mom's have set a timer just to be sure they do.)

Love and More Love,
Grinity

Annaliisa, if anxiety is a day-in day-out problem, I think you should have her seen by a psychologist. Anxiety can be really disabling, whether it's stand-alone or part of another condition (my DS is anxious because of his Asperger's). And yet it's treatable, and that can make a huge difference to quality of life.

DeeDee

Annalisa: I feel bad giving you one more thing to think about. But I just wanted to suggest that you including Stanford's Carol Dweck's research in your list of reading. She has a couple of concepts that I've found very helpful on a day to day basis working/talking with my children about academics.

One, that "intelligence praise" we give our children can backfire so that they don't risk doing tasks at which they might not excel. She has done some experiments that show clearly the type of praise that encourages a child to try harder things, and the type of praise where children opt to take the "safe" task.


Second, her discussion of a growth mindset: people believe they can develop their brain, abilities, and talent. This view creates a love for learning, a drive for growth and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishments.

Do you have any thoughts of switching from home schooling back to a public or private school? My children both refuse to accept formal instruction from me or DH, and completely shut down when we attempt to teach them anything that we initiate. They are happy to self-instigate exploration of all kinds of reading, math, and science concepts, and do so constantly, but the minute we try to introduce something resembling actual teaching, they shut down and refuse to engage.

DS6 thankfully has been perfectly willing to accept formal instruction in K, and so has learned to read along with his classmates, even though he was capable of learning at home at age 3. DD4 is thus far showing the same tendencies. I can't imagine trying to homeschool either of them because they are so resistant to instruction from me or DH. We've consulted a private educational counseling specialist a couple of times in the last year, and she said that's a common situation, especially with kids who are perfectionists and don't want to get things wrong in front of their parents - in line with what other posters have responded. So just posing the question of whether public/private schooling would be an option if you and DD continue to have issues with challenging work at home. No matter what, kudos to you for working so hard to meet your DD's needs.